This dissertation is presented in the form of three essays on International Business studies. The purpose of the dissertation is to address the interdependence between the macroeconomy and finance at three levels of analysis: the conceptual level, the economic policy level, and the corporate policy level. Each essay addresses one of these levels. The empirical focus is on developing countries in general---and Latin America in particular---because in recent history these countries have experienced large economic fluctuations and major regime shifts. The introduction surveys the literature on the relationship between the financial sector and economic growth. The first essay synthesizes the literature concerning the benefits, risks, and costs of financial liberalization in developing countries and presents illustrative data on its recent implementation and outcomes. The second essay investigates the causal relationships between real activity, inflation, and financial assets' returns in seven major Latin American economies (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela) over the period 1976--1999, using vector autoregression analysis to explore the puzzling negative relationship observed elsewhere between real stock returns and inflation. The third essay investigates whether macroeconomic factors are as important as traditional firm-specific and country-specific factors as determinants of capital structure for a sample of firms from the seven Latin American countries mentioned above in the period 1986--2000 using panel data analysis. Empirical comparisons are drawn with industrial economies: the G-7 economies in the second essay and a subset of United States firms in the third. The final chapter presents the conclusions of this dissertation. The main finding is that differences between advanced and emerging economies in the relationship among economic variables do not seem as clear-cut as often assumed by academicians, policy
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.84202 |
| Date | January 2002 |
| Creators | Terra, Paulo Renato Soares |
| Contributors | Jorgensen, Jan Jelmert (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Faculty of Management.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001985338, proquestno: AAINQ88588, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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